PROBLEM: tickless scheduling

[Donald Allen]

1. Network file transfers and fscks stop on Toshiba netbook unless
system receives external events
2. I have a new Toshiba NB305 on which I installed the beta release of
Slackware 13.1, which provides a 2.6.33.3 kernel with the tickless
option enabled. With this machine on my ethernet, I attempted to rsync
my home directory to it, about 9 Gb, from a workstation that is my
primary system (running Slackware 13). The transfer proceeded normally
for awhile and then stopped, which I could see in the xterm on the
workstation. I went to the netbook to see what was going on there and
when I began typing, the transfer resumed. I ran 'top' on the netbook
and it would freeze after a few updates, coinciding with the file
transfer pausing again. Typing would get things moving. At another
point, I tested pm-suspend on the netbook. Suspending worked, but
awakening did not, so I had to power-cycle the machine. I use ext2 for
reasons which I won't attempt to justify here, so when the machine
came back up, it fsck'ed the root filesystem. Here again I saw things
grind to a halt -- the progress meter stopped and the there was no
disk activity. But if I moved my finger on the touchpad, things would
get moving again. The only way to get the fsck to complete was to
constantly be tickling the touchpad. I corresponded with Patrick
Volkerding, telling him I suspected a scheduling problem and he
informed me that the 13.1 kernel had tickless enabled, unlike 13. So I
built a 2.6.33.3 kernel (from the Slackware-supplied kernel sources)
with tickless disabled. With that kernel running, I power-cycled the
machine to force a fsck of the root filesystem. This one proceeded to
completion normally -- no external stimuli needed.
3. Tickless, scheduler
4. 2.6.33.3
7.1 ver_linux output attached
7.2 /proc/cpuinfo attached
7.3 /proc/modules attached
7.4 /proc/ioports, /proc/iomem attached
7.5 lspci attached
7.6 /proc/scsi/scsi attached

Attachment: ver_linux
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Attachment: cpuinfo
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Attachment: modules
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Attachment: ioports
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Attachment: iomem
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Attachment: lspci
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Attachment: scsi
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